I have just seen the vapor trails of an argument concerning the value of fanfic that has flown around a corner of the internet quite recently.<\/p>\n
Fan Fiction (Fanfic) is a curious beast. It is summed up nicely by wikipedia as “stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.\u201d Fanfic stories can be encouraged by the original creators or not but are very rarely accepted as canon.\u00a0 You get different levels of quality in fanfic and different tones running from that which would be in keeping with the tone of the original piece\u00a0 to comedic interpretations through to the exploration of\u2026 “romantic”\u2026themes.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019m not sure where I come down in the argument, or if I even have the right to hold a valid opinion on the matter seeing as I’m hardly a prolific creator and the creations I have made are hardly trail blazing pieces of originality likely to be hijacked by a fan community.\u00a0 I think my problem with fanfic is that I don\u2019t really see the point. I don\u2019t see the point of creating or reading fanfic.\u00a0 I suppose as a narrative exercise, it\u2019s not a bad way of learning story telling using someone else\u2019s prefabricated characters or settings, but I suspect that\u2019s rarely why it\u2019s written. Ultimately though, I don\u2019t see how you can write fanfic and get anything to happen. They aren\u2019t your characters and even if you understand them incredibly well, it\u2019s still going to feel like you\u2019re playing with a set of action figures: All the elements are there, but the result is something that just doesn\u2019t feel quite right because you don\u2019t know the characters properly.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t see the point of reading fanfic. I can\u2019t see why anyone would invest that much time in reading works about characters that they know and love that they know aren\u2019t from a sanctioned source, because throughout reading, you will know that it is pointless: The events of the story must either reset themselves to the status quo by the end, or be completely swept under the carpet at the end of the story because it\u2019s not part of the canon.<\/p>\n
This is a bit like if you\u2019ve ever watched an anime series and found an episode that\u2019s not part of the usual continuity and breaks away from the main plot and feels ever so slightly off: Chances are that episode is \u201cfiller\u201d \u2013 an episode used to hide a gap in scheduling whereby the animated TV show has caught up with the printed manga comic from which is based\u00a0and they need to give them a couple more weeks to get the next comic or two out.\u00a0 The filler episode can, optimistically,\u00a0\u201cexplore themes and character traits not fully explored in the original works\u201d, or more likely, provide no advance to the plot and no significant advance to our understanding of the established characters and can very happily be skipped entirely.\u00a0 Fanfic, like the better filler episodes, can be fun, funny, well constructed, but it will always be ultimately pointless.<\/p>\n
Calling something like this pointless is probably a little unfair, but I suppose it depends on what the fanfic is about. If it is fanfic concerning the characters of George R R Martin\u2019s Fire and Ice, then it is pointless: The series is a multi-layered tangled web of intrigue, plots and overall strong characterization. Anything written about those characters in that world that is not from George R R Martin himself is going to detract from the experience and narrative if read, especially as the series has not reached its conclusion yet.\u00a0 Maybe for something like Sherlock Holmes, then fanfic is less damaging due to the episodic nature of the stories and the fairly light hearted tone of the piece. Likewise, maybe fanfic set in the star wars universe, so long as it doesn\u2019t mess around with the main characters and original plot too much, wouldn\u2019t necessarily be damaging.<\/p>\n
Finally, I don\u2019t really see the attraction of creating fanfic, beyond the fact that I think it\u2019s pointless. Maybe this renders my argument utterly moot, as I am basically saying \u201cI don\u2019t understand it, therefore I don\u2019t think I like it\u201d but I just can\u2019t see the attraction of taking someone else\u2019s creations and trying to build something of your own out of them. I of course can\u2019t comprehend why other people don\u2019t like building their own creations. I started drawing comics after reading a series of batman and thinking \u201cI think I\u2019d rather do my own now\u201d and I\u2019ve started trying to program for similar reasons. \u00a0Being a terrible geek, I have been running a D&D campaign and despite the setting not being entirely original and still borrowing from the standard settings when I run out of time or creative juices, I have created my own campaign space with my own regions, creatures, religion, politics purely because I can\u2019t see the attraction in using all of the prefabricated stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I once made a little side scrolling shooter game using sonic the hedgehog sprites, just to teach me how to use a particular creative suite. This is probably how the argument goes with fanfic: using the prefabricated stuff to learn a skill. That\u2019s fine, but I showed my game to a friend and he said \u201cyeah, that\u2019s not bad, but if you\u2019d used your own sprites that would be good\u201d and he was absolutely right.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing fundamentally wrong with fanfic, but it amounts to little more than children playing with action figures and so long as it\u2019s seen that way, it will have about as much impact.<\/p>\n
Additional Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n Probably destroying the entire argument, I did read a piece of fanfic (and I’m sorry to say I can’t properly cite it) that was set in a world that assumed J K Rowling’s world of Harry Potter did actually exist in the same world as our world, our world with the books and films of Harry Potter published in it as well.\u00a0 A nice little paradoxical\u00a0soft brain twister.\u00a0<\/p>\n The story focussed on Cho, who went for an audition for the part of herself in one of the films, but didn’t get it because she clearly didn’t understand the motivation for the character.\u00a0 That made me giggle a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have just seen the vapor trails of an argument concerning the value of fanfic that has flown around a corner of the internet quite recently. Fan Fiction (Fanfic) is a curious beast. It is summed up nicely by wikipedia as “stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[21,239],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-learning","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"\n